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Re: In Search of Schrödinger's cat

By: Decomposed in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (0)
Sat, 25 Mar 23 5:00 AM | 48 view(s)
Boardmark this board | 6th Edition Pope Board 		Msg. 41258 of 58543
(This msg. is a reply to 40897 by Decomposed)
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Done! And I wrote a neat synopsis, should anyone be interested. It's just 41 pages long.

There is, by the way, an interesting but not terribly deep quantum mechanics series available on Amazon Prime: The Secrets of Quantum Physics. It's not too long... two one-hour episodes. If you've got Prime video, you might want to watch it.

My next book has already been decided upon and ordered: First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country - by Thomas E. Ricks. This is a recent Pulitzer Prize winning book so it should be good.

I didn't find it used on ABEbooks, but Amazon itself had "like new" publisher overstock copies on sale for about $9. I'm not seeing quite that good a deal now. Maybe I got the last one.




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months


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The above is a reply to the following message:
In Search of Schrödinger's cat
By: Decomposed in 6TH POPE
Sat, 11 Mar 23 9:22 PM 		Msg. 40897 of 58543

This is a really interesting book, chock full of stories and things I didn't know. I'm up to chapter 8 and still 'getting it.' If I can follow it, you guys can too. One thing I've learned:

According to Einstein, the energy of a particle with mass m and momentum p is E = m²c^4 + p²c², which reduces to E=mc² when the momentum is zero. Everyone knows that the square root of a number is both positive and negative. The square root of 4 is ±2. So E, in Einstein's equation, must be both positive and negative.

In math, that is.

Most people would consider that to be a meaningless math quirk and let it go, that negative energy is nonsensical. Paul Dirac, though, was a British genius on nearly the same level as Newton. He considered that electrons lose energy and drop to a lower state or shell, but stop when they reach the ground level. He supposed they wouldn't go into a negative state because the negative shells are already full, apparently existing in a sea of negative energy. He further supposed that if electrons in a negative state were bombarded with energy, they would absorb quanta just as regular electrons do and bump upward, emerging out of the negative sea into the ground state and leaving an energy hole behind. This "positron" would look just like an ordinary electron but be positively charged.

That was in the late 1920s. Carl Anderson, an American physicist, found the positron in cloud chamber experiments in 1932. And that's how antimatter was discovered. One more thing that began with Einstein.

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